If you couldn’t figure out what in the world happened to the Detroit Lions in Saturday’s ugly 37-23 loss in Carolina to the Panthers, you are not alone. Lions head coach Dan Campbell was at a loss for his team’s terrible defensive effort and overall flat performance in Week 16.
“I cannot explain that,” Campbell said after the game. “I can’t explain that. I know this, they come off a real tough loss against a physical team and they’re a physical team. And they were not — they were going to make sure that didn’t happen again, and they did that.”
It was a loss that defied explanation when compared to how well the Lions had been playing. The Lions had a top-5 run defense against running backs (excluding QB runs) in the four weeks prior to playing Carolina. That defense allowed a Panthers’ team record 320 on the ground, almost all of it to RBs Chuba Hubbard and D’Onta Foreman. Both Foreman (165) and Hubbard (125) set career-highs in rushing in the game.
After letting the question mull in his head a bit, the coach got more introspective.
“You get what you deserve in this league,” Campbell said. “That’s why you love it. It’s heartbreaking, but it’s also why I love it, man. And we all love it. If you’re a true competitor, we got exactly what we deserved today. I mean, by the way we played we deserved that, and just like we deserve what happened to us before that. By the way we played, we earned it. We earned what we got today, and we earned the six wins before that.”
The key now for Campbell and his staff is to discern why the team flopped so badly after such an impressive run of games. The Lions still have a decent chance to make the postseason for the first time since 2016, but they’ll need to recover quickly from the resounding defeat in Carolina.
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